Contemporary Monument Concepts in Germany

Debates have been underway in Germany since the early 1980s on relevant and appropriate forms of remembrance. The long and extraordinarily difficult debate on the content and form of a memorial site to remember the genocide of millions of Jews certainly marked the climax of this discourse.

Debates on appropriate forms of remembrance

In the mid-nineties, the debates about how to remember appropriately were one of the key leitmotifs of Germany’s political culture, particularly after German reunification (1990) and in the context of the 50th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camps and the end of the war. The focus continued to be on coming to terms with the National Socialist regime and World War II. However, questions on how to deal with German-German history, too, and the very different monument cultures in the two German states, increasingly became the focus of controversy. Coming to terms with this specific German issue became highly significant for the way in which the so-called Berlin Republic (a term that has been used since the relocation of the parliament and government from Bonn to Berlin in 1999) defines itself politically and culturally.

A Federal memorial site concept drawn up back in 1999 was further developed in 2008. According to its title, its aim is to “Assume responsibility, strengthen coming to terms with the past and deepen remembrance”. The concept sums up the memorial policy debate in Germany that has been going on for years and, not least, is an attempt to create a common identity. Above all, the aim is to appropriately deal with the different approaches to history and the different cultures of memory in East and West while at the same time dealing with Nazi terror and communist dictatorship in a differentiated way that also highlights the differences between the two systems. Groups of victims who had no place in the official remembrance scene are now to receive recognition too, however.

Other monuments

Since Peter Eisenman’s Field of Stelae for the murdered Jews of Europe located within sight of the government quarter became an integral part of the new German representation scene at the heart of the capital, other memorials for other groups of victims of the Nazi regime have been erected nearby. A monument to persecuted homosexuals was inaugurated on the edge of the Tiergarten in summer 2008 at the initiative of the homosexuals’ association and citizens’ initiatives, for example. The design by the Danish-Norwegian artists Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset also features a grey concrete stele in which a video showing a male couple kissing is to be seen through a small aperture. Every two years, the video is to be replaced, particularly so that the changing motifs can also include female homosexuality. Another memorial is currently being erected immediately south of the Reichstag building. Based on a design by Dani Karavan, it will be a memorial to the persecuted Sinti and Roma. Finally, a temporary or itinerant memorial in the form of a concrete bus, which is to be installed successively in a number of cities, is to remember the victims of the Nazi policy of euthanasia.

Critical voices

For the initiators, the monuments erected, particularly those located near the government quarter, are not simply memorials as a warning to future generations. They are also understood to be an appeal to the government’s responsibility for human rights and for minorities’ rights to self-determination. Today’s differentiated memorial scene is the result of the process of coming to terms with the complexity of remembrance policy over many years. During the 1990s in particular, however, the representative political character of the new German culture of monuments became the subject of numerous critical commentaries. One example here is the new design of the “Neue Wache” (i.e. New Guard House) on Unter den Linden in Berlin, which in 1993 was called a “Monument to the Victims of War and Tyranny”. In view of the “Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe” projects, critical voices warned not least against an inappropriate attempt to express the dimensions of the crime by the monumentality of the memorial. It was in this sense that the American English and Judaic Studies scholar James E. Young, one of the many critical commentators of the plans and debates on the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, evaluated the often painful discourse on remembrance culture in Germany as being the real memorial. In his view, this is something that cannot be replaced by a perfect, finished monument.

Monument culture as remembrance work

Young touched upon the key issues of the true culture of monuments here: is putting up a monument about recording interpreted history? Or should not monuments rather act as a prompt for ongoing reflection? Can the significance of the object of remembrance be expressed by means of traditional grand iconography – monumentality, marble, concrete and bronze? Can a traditional representative monument be the starting point for individual commemoration at all? What significance should the “authentic places of the perpetrators” have in the context of the new monuments which have been put up, such as the memorial sites already existing in the concentration camps, but also the so-called Topography of Terror on the former site of the Gestapo’s headquarters in Berlin?

The topos of “remembrance work” is at the forefront of many contemporary memorial concepts in the context of debates on the subject. Works have been created which very often draw on Concept Art and are intended to be less a traditional monument then a “stone that will make men stumble”.

This dossier presents a series of exemplary contemporary monument concepts in Germany. Above all, these are concepts that aim to confront the past actively, independently and critically, concepts that aim to show traces of the past and which address the problem that there are multi-faceted possible ways to approach history.

The series of subjects discussed is intended to reflect at least in part the broad scope of the contemporary search for an appropriate way for the state and individuals to deal with remembrance, responsibility and taking up a position by means of thought-provoking monuments in the public space.